BIOGRAPHY

Shanai Haana Matteson (b. 1982) is a visual artist, writer, mother, community-based researcher, and cultural organizer. She is a settler/visitor who currently resides in Anishinaabe territory, or rural Aitkin County. She works across rural and other places on regenerative cultural and ecological projects.

Shanai is passionate about many things… Including community-based art and organizing work that serves the goals of social and environmental justice, water equity, climate resilience, Indigenous cultural resurgence and land return, the end of violence and oppression, and the emergence of feminist and wholistic economies.

Shanai creates collaborative public art projects, documentary films, literary work (poetry and essays) and social spaces that are rooted in regenerative principles; and that explore our most intimate social and political entanglements. Through her creative and community life, Shanai seeks to transform her own relationships while encouraging a culture of reciprocity, kinship, self-determination, and collective care.

Shanai is originally from the small town of Palisade in northern Aitkin County, Minnesota, which is where she also lives today. Her family and rural community are an important source of inspiration, encouraging her to integrate the loving work of raising children with active participation in community and political life, and with ongoing collective struggles for economic, racial, and environmental justice.

She is co-founder and collaborative director of Water Bar & Public Studio, an artist-led benefit corporation that serves water to build relationships that transform culture. Prior to founding Water Bar in 2014, she and her collaborator Colin Kloecker led the nationally-recognized public art and design collective Works Progress. As Works Progress Studio, Shanai and her partners organized dozens of socially-engaged art spaces and events, and were founding members of the national network Common Field. Shanai co-organized the 2015 Hand-in-Glove Conference (now Common Field Convening) in Minneapolis, as well as related efforts to advance the field of artist-led organizations.

Shanai was one of the designers and curators of the City Art Collaboratory program of Public Art Saint Paul, a fellowship and think tank for artists and scientists immersed in systems thinking and paradigm work. As a cultural community organizer, Shanai continues to develop platforms for artists to research in collaboration with others, especially those working in the environmental sciences and water resource fields.

She was co-convener of the University of Minnesota-sponsored collaborative Ways of Knowing Water, and speaks frequently at conferences and public events about ways that art-science collaborations can advance water equity, climate resilience, and social justice.

In addition to her work serving water and community through her own projects, Shanai is active in other efforts to heal relationships between people, land, water, and place. She is a core partner in the indigenous-led Healing Place Collaborative, a group of artists, educators, researchers, and activists who play leadership roles in articulating the vital nature of the Mississippi River and indigenous leadership in the life of the Twin Cities - a Dakota place. Shanai also serves on the community advisory board (or fictive kinship) of Yo Mama’s House Cooperative, a regenerative space and network for women in their roles as mothers, artists, activists and healers, led by artist and elder Amoke Kubat.

Shanai and her collaborators have been featured in museum exhibitions, art spaces, and publications across the United States, but whenever possible, she prefers to work close to home. She is most interested in emergent and strategic arts activism at the margins of established fields and practices, and believes edges and intersections provide the most fertile ground for artists and others to learn and create together.

Shanai studied creative writing at the Perpich Center for Arts Education (2000), attended the University of Minnesota for Cultural Studies and History of Science (2005), and is an alum of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA) Art for Social Change program.

She was a Fellow in the Creative Community Leadership Institute at Intermedia Arts in 2011, received a 2013 Bush Fellowship for her arts and environmental leadership work, was the recipient of a 2014 River Stewards Emerging Leader Award from the Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation, and a 2018 Public Health Heroes Award from the City of Minneapolis. She is a 2018 McKnight Visual Arts Fellow, and is a spring 2020 resident artist at the Weisman Art Museum’s Collaboration Incubator.

As an artist, Shanai and her collaborators have been awarded grants and fellowships from Forecast Public Art, Metropolitan Regional Art Council, the McKnight Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Shanai was part of the Advisory Group for the US Water Alliance's national initiative Advancing One Water Through Arts and Culture. She organized the 2018 Minnesota Artist Delegation to the One Water Summit, was a member of the Arts and Culture Delegation to the 2019 One Water Summit, and remains committed to connecting artists and others committed to water systems work locally and across the United States.

She continues to work collaboratively with many others, and across many different spaces and places.

You can connect with her here and here, or send her a note.